


117. chokehold

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [256]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, really been a lot of these recently huh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 04:07:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10267871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Sarah stabs an assassin in the liver with rebar and then Sarah dreams about her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: reference to abuse]

Sarah stabs an assassin in the liver with rebar and then Sarah dreams about her. She’s asleep in Beth’s bed/apartment/life and she closes her eyes and the assassin is there, again, crouching over her. She offers Sarah a hand up. _I know,_ she says, in the accent Sarah didn’t quite catch the first time around. (In the glass cage of her dream it paces back and forth through countries, an anxious animal.) _I see you._

_What?_ Sarah says.

The assassin just smiles, bloody teeth. _All of it_ , she says. She puts her hands on Sarah’s face, her thumbs where her knife was – which is to say, under Sarah’s eyes. _I_ see _you,_ she says again, and Sarah wakes up.

She thinks about the dream and she can’t stop. What? What had she seen? The way she’d said it, her voice catching on the cadences in Sarah’s dream – depending on the time of day it shifts, so this version of herself knows her anger and her sorrow and her loneliness, her guilt. Sarah keeps trying to catch fragments of memory – she can only catch fragments, it’s splintered apart by fear – and in her memory the eyes above her turn knowing and kind and cruel by turns. She has to know. Sarah has to know what she knows.

But the trail is cold. The assassin vanishes; the boarding house is packed up, and Sarah receives no taunting phone calls or cryptic clues. Art and “Beth” find a bathroom soaked with blood, but Sarah already knows it doesn’t mean anything. She stands in front of the mirror and – god help her – she can _feel_ it. Her own wound in her side. The assassin must have stitched herself up, and it feels like Sarah redyeing her hair, it feels like cleaning up scrapes in front of a shitty broken mirror in an endless series of shitty broken clubs, apartments, bathrooms.

“We have to find her,” Cosima says into the Skype window. “We have to find out what she knows.”

“I know,” Sarah says. “I’m looking.”

* * *

She is.

* * *

In the end the assassin finds her first. Sarah comes back to Beth’s apartment (empty, Paul gone) and as soon as she is sitting down the glass door to Beth’s backyard slides open. Sarah fumbles for her gun. Sarah points it at the door.

“Sit down,” she says, and she hates the clumsy eagerness of her voice.

“Hello again, not-Beth,” says the assassin. She’s stumbling a little. Sarah wonders if her stab wound is still bleeding.

“Who are you,” Sarah says, her own voice bleeding something desperate.

“Helena,” says the assassin. She sits down obligingly, eyeing the gun and not Sarah at all. Sarah hates her. She has to look at Sarah, she _has_ to, Sarah has to see if she can tell. Alison and Cosima, they – couldn’t tell. Sarah mentioned Vic offhandedly and neither of them got it; they haven’t stood in front of a mirror, meeting their own eyes in the mirror and wondering how the hell they got here. They haven’t bled like Sarah. The woman here wants her dead but she’s bled like Sarah and Sarah _needs_ —

“Helena,” Sarah echoes. “Where did you come from?”

“God sent me,” Helena says. “Put down your gun, little sheep. Die easy.”

Sarah doesn’t know if she can fire the gun. Terrible realization, but she has it and it’s hers. “No,” she says. “I need to know what you know.”

“Why?” Helena says. “You will die soon. Anyways.”

“You can’t kill me,” Sarah says.

Helena grins at her, her whole face sharp. Her skin is sallow. She’s sweating, her whole body collapsing like a tent around that one wound. Her face says: _try me._

“We’re – connected,” Sarah says. “You and me. You can’t tell?”

Helena spits on the ground. Her face is spectacularly unconcerned. “The only connection we have,” she says, “is when I get my hands around your neck. Or my knife. Or my gun. No difference to me, sheep. If you hand me the gun now, I can make it fast for you.” She holds up her hand and makes a little x over the space on her chest across from her heart.

“No,” Sarah says, “no, you have to—” but of course she doesn’t have to. Sarah had a dream. She dreams all sorts of things that aren’t true. She lowers the gun to half-mast and studies Helena and shakes. If she doesn’t pull the trigger she dies. If she does pull the trigger Helena dies, and that shouldn’t mean anything.

“I had a dream about you,” she says.

Helena’s eyebrows twitch closer to each other and her head tilts to the side, a puppyish gesture of confusion.

“You knew me,” Sarah continues. “I knew you.”

Helena leans forward slightly in her chair. “What was it like,” she says. When she notices she’s leaning she stops, and shoves herself backwards against her chair. Her hands are fidgeting under the table, picking at themselves. Sarah does that too, when her hands aren’t full of gun.

“Well,” Sarah says, “I’m not killing you, am I? You tell me.”

Her hand is sweating around the gun and she moves it to her other hand. Helena’s eyes jump to the gun and then back to Sarah’s face. They’re wide. Sarah wipes her hand on the bottom of Beth’s shirt, clenches it into a fist to try and keep it from trembling.

“What did you know about me,” Helena breathes.

“You’re angry,” Sarah says. “And sad, and lonely, and guilty.”

“No,” Helena says. “That’s not true.” Her cuticle is bleeding from how hard she’s picking at it. “I am not a sheep like you. I have no guilts.”

“You’re lying,” Sarah says. “I think you want me to know you. I think you’re just as lonely as me, Helena.”

Key in the lock and Helena is on her feet, stumbling and unsteady. “It’s not true,” she says, backing away towards the sliding door. “I will come back and slit your throat, little sheep. I will.”

Sarah stands up from the table and follows Helena towards the door like they’re tied together. “You can feel it,” she says.

Helena pauses at fumbling for the door. She opens her mouth, like she’s going to say something – but then the front door opens for Paul, and Helena ducks out the back door and is gone.


End file.
